Augustus John (12 page)

In Augustus’s second term at the Slade two new teachers arrived. Both taught painting. Philip Wilson Steer was already one of the most celebrated artists in the country, and one of the worst art teachers in the world. But Augustus liked his quiet humour. He was a large, friendly, small-headed, slow-moving man, inarticulate and easygoing. When he was appointed to the Order of Merit he took the insignia along to show Tonks and asked: ‘Have you received one of these?’ Although he was England’s most distinguished living painter, no one would ever guess he painted – or at least he hoped not. He travelled the country with his painting
materials locked up in a cricket bag, explaining: ‘I get better service that way.’ It was true that he had studied in Paris, but he never troubled to learn French. England’s most revolutionary artist was a deeply conservative man. He gained a reputation for wisdom yet scarcely ever spoke. Of his own fame he seemed unaware and would refer to his job (if there were no avoiding it) as ‘muddling along with paint’. Yet he could be witty and had a sharp sense of character. ‘Will Rothenstein paints pretty well like the rest of us,’ he once murmured, ‘ – but from higher motives, of course.’ Asked one evening what was wrong with an artist who had made an attempt upon the virtue of a servant girl, and who entered his drawing-room leaning upon a stick, he hazarded: ‘Housemaid’s knee, I suppose.’ His chief enemy was draughts, and to outwit them he would dress, at the height of summer, in a heavy overcoat, yachting cap and policeman’s boots.

At the Slade, Steer gave full expression to his inertia. Students awaiting his criticism as he sat behind them would turn at last to find him apparently asleep. As a result of such methods, Augustus was never taught very seriously to paint. His technique in oils remained rather clumsy at the Slade. But he was impressed by the ‘flickering and voluptuous’ touch with which Steer reworked his students’ paintings and was part of a rococo style that had replaced his impressionistic use of colour.

The other new teacher was Walter Russell, a dry unmemorable man. Only three years after joining Brown’s team, Russell, a member of the New English Art Club, was exhibiting his work at the Royal Academy. Since the New English was the chief rallying ground for opposition to the Academy, and since the Slade of Brown and Tonks was a nursery for this opposition, Russell’s career seems to suggest an extraordinary contradiction. Increasingly he became a link between the Royal Academy and the forces that had set themselves up to oppose it. He remained at the Slade for thirty-two years and was knighted as a senior Academician, his career providing an index to the condition of painting in England.

The ties that Russell formed between the Slade and the Royal Academy enabled new talent to be directed towards the academic tradition of art in Britain. So when at last the ‘Roger Fry rabble’, as Tonks captioned them, advanced across the country after 1910 with their rallying cry of ‘Cézanna!’ they were opposed not just by the diehards at the Royal Academy, but by alert and combative reformers such as Tonks, who had behind him some of the most gifted young artists in the country and who, for the next twenty years, fought a vigorous defensive campaign against the invasion of Post-Impressionism, futurism and all abstract art. ‘It is interesting to observe, and this is a fine lesson, how degradation sets in at once with the coming in of contempt for Nature,’ Tonks wrote to the artist Albert
Rutherston (5 January 1932). ‘We are no good without it, we are like children, without guardians. The last twenty years have been I believe the worst on record, speaking generally, and because of this Roger Fry has upset the applecart.’

Those who, like Augustus, owed their loyalty to Tonks, were to find that the solid ground under their feet was no longer connected to the mainland of contemporary art. ‘I was never apprenticed to a master whom I might follow humbly and perhaps overtake.’ Tonks, remarkable man though he was, could only act as go-between, pointing his way back to the Old Masters. But the Old Masters were many, and all of them were dead. Augustus needed a living master. With patience, he might have found a new guardian for his talent. But in the summer of 1895 he suffered an accident, the long-term effects of which were to remove the quality of patience he needed.

‘The Slade continues to produce geniuses, we turn them out every year.’

Henry Tonks to Ronald Gray (November 1901)

Augustus was happy at the Slade. In his second year he won a certificate for figure drawing, a prize for advanced antique drawing and, much to his father’s gratification, a Slade scholarship of thirty-five pounds a year for two years. But at home he was discontented. Never had Tenby seemed so provincial, Victoria House so mean and squalid. Whenever possible he would avoid staying there, and go off on expeditions in Wales and England, and later to Belgium and Holland, with his two friends Ambrose McEvoy and Benjamin Evans.

When it was not possible to escape, he occasionally invited a friend down to share his exile. One winter his fellow student Michel Salaman came for a week. It was an alarming holiday. Salaman was the same age as Augustus and belonged to a large and distinguished red-haired fox-hunting family that had made its fortune in ostrich feathers. The atmosphere of Victoria House was unlike anything he had experienced. Edwin, very dry and upright, made all conversation, even in whispers, sound a vulgarity. Thornton appeared to be a sort of hobbledehoy, utterly miserable when not playing cards. Winifred seemed dull and musical except in the presence of Gwen, when the two girls would giggle continuously, much
to Salaman’s dismay. Gus, he thought, was quite out of place in these strange surroundings. Between dismal meals, the two boys would hurry off to the caves where Gus flew from rock to rock with the most agile and dangerous leaps. They also penetrated deep into the blackness of these caves, using up all their matches and unnerving Salaman with the thought that they’d be discovered, two heaps of bones, fifty years later. On another occasion, seeing a navvy who was bullying a child in the street, Augustus strode up and, while Salaman looked on in horror, put a stop to the affair by challenging the navvy to a fight. By the end of his visit Salaman was exhausted. He never went back.

At the beginning of the summer holidays of 1895 Augustus set off on a camping trip round Pembrokeshire with McEvoy, Evans and a donkey. It was in keeping with his Whitmanesque spirit of freedom. At Haverfordwest they fell in with a party of Irish tinkers ‘rich in the wisdom of the road’; at Solva they were taught by a tramp how to snare rabbits. They drank beer in wayside inns, entered themselves unsuccessfully in village regattas, joined with more success in old-fashioned games ‘which included a good deal of singing and kissing’,
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and painted ‘the Rape of the Sabine Women’. It was an exhilarating summer. ‘My friends and myself are encamped in a place called Newgate with two cottages and one partially built and a stretch of sand two miles long,’ Augustus wrote to another student, Ursula Tyrwhitt.

‘The Atlantic continually plays music on the beach. Outside browses the Donkey, our hope and pride. On this animal we depend to draw our cart and baggage… Outside the tent the odour of the fragrant onion arises on the summer air, it is McEvoy who cooks. One night we slept under the eternal stars, one of which alone was visible – Venus – and that I regret was placed exactly over my head.’

When they arrived back in Tenby, McEvoy and Evans left for London. Augustus expected to join them again shortly at the Slade. Meanwhile he had to steel himself for a week or two at Victoria House. The boredom was excruciating. He felt tempted to do all manner of wild things, but did nothing – there was nothing to do. One afternoon towards the end of his vacation he went to bathe on the South Sands with Gwen, Winifred and their friend Irene Mackenzie. The tide was far out but on the turn, and he decided to go off on his own and practise diving from Giltar Point. He climbed the rock and looked down. The surface of the water was strewn with seaweed. He stripped off his clothes and dived in. ‘Instantly I was made aware of my folly,’ he later wrote. ‘The impact of my skull on a hidden rock was terrific. The universe seemed to explode!’
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Possibly
because of the cold water he did not lose consciousness and somehow managed to drag himself to the shore. Part of his scalp had been torn away and lay flapping over one eye. The ebb and flow of his blood was everywhere. He did what first aid he could, dressed slowly, turbaned his towel round his head and set off back to the South Sands. ‘Presently he came running back,’ Irene Mackenzie recalled, ‘with blood pouring from his forehead.’
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Edwin, who had joined his daughters on the beach, was greatly alarmed. They must get him back to the privacy of the house as discreetly as possible. Augustus was already feeling very weak. They hurried him back by a curious zig-zag route to his bed. Here he seems to have lost consciousness for a time. The next thing he knew was that he was being examined, rather to his gratification, not by the family’s usual practitioner, but by Dr Lock, a far more eminent and romantic figure. Dr Lock stitched his wound, told him that he probably owed his life to his uncommonly thick skull, and left. Little more needed to be done. It was essential, however, that he have a period of convalescence in Victoria House. This ‘durance vile’
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was by far the worst part of his accident. ‘As my brain clears I find my confinement here more galling,’ he complained to Ursula Tyrwhitt.

‘But I’m healing like a dog – the doctor is amazed at the way I heal. The wound is the worst of its kind he has had to deal with. If I appear at all cracked at any time in the future, I trust you will put it down to my knock on the head and not to any original madness. The worst part of it is the beef tea, I think. I am not allowed to remain long in peace without the slavey bearing in an enormous cup of that beverage… Man cannot live by beef tea alone.’

The students gathered at the Slade, but Augustus was not among them. Even Gwen had gone to London. He perspired with impatience. His wound was healing, it seemed, by the force of willpower. Even so it was a slow business. For a time Augustus tried working on his own. ‘I have been doing sketches for a Poster for cocoa,’ he told Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘…It’s great fun, but difficult – like everything else.’ Then suddenly he tired of this: ‘I’m sick of doing comic sketches… I don’t feel in a comic mood at all.’ His feelings were of colossal tedium and colossal revolt. Once he was free from this appalling imprisonment he would do such things… In the meantime: ‘I am horribly dull. I was hoping for some signs that my brain was affected – a little madness is so enlivening. I do hope this dullness is not permanent.’

His handwriting in these letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt grows increasingly wild and there are drawings of himself, like a wounded soldier, with a
bandage round his head and the beginnings of a beard. ‘You must have lots of news to tell me, if only you would,’ he pleads. ‘I am insatiable.’ And when Ursula does write to him he calls her ‘an angel’ and feels better. ‘In fact I got up this morning before the doctor came and he was quite annoyed… they’ve cut away a great patch of my hair which will look funny I daresay. I’m longing to see a good picture again… I’m going to paint next term. Hurrah! How exciting it is… I feel sure
another
letter would complete the cure.’

His own letters also contain a rather tentative declaration of love. He recalls the last romantic evening of the summer term. ‘How the strawberries sweetened one’s sorrow! – how the roses made one’s despair almost acceptable! How you extinguished everybody at the Soirée! Before you came it was night – a starry beautiful night, but you brought as it were the dawn which made the stars turn pale and flee, remaining alone with its own glorious roseate luminescence. Selah!’

At first he is merely in love with love itself, but soon he becomes more practical. He wants to extract from her ‘like a tooth’ the pledge that he may keep company with her once he returns. Is he to be allowed ‘to take you home’, he asks. ‘I mean to accompany you?’ In return he will lend her his Rembrandt book. They must have an understanding.

When he does go back to the Slade that autumn he is transformed. Upon his head he wears a smoking-cap of black velvet and gold embroidery to conceal his wound; and round his cheeks and chin sprout small tufts of red hair. He had become, Ethel Hatch noticed, extremely untidy – quite unlike the spruce, clean-shaven youth whom she had met the previous year.

The Augustus John legend was beginning.

This legend is a good example of how a remarkable man may be simplified into a popular myth. In the public imagination he was to represent the Great Artist, the Great Lover and the Great Bohemian. It was an ironic comment on his actual career, one which he did not accept himself but never effectively contradicted.

The story is perhaps more succinctly told on the back of a Brooke Bond tea card, as one of a series of fifty Famous People. Here Virginia Shankland wrote that Augustus John ‘hit his head on a rock whilst diving, and emerged from the water a genius!’
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To this must be added one further ingredient of the legend, perhaps not palatable to Brooke Bond tea drinkers. ‘As a man he was larger than life-size,’ wrote a
Daily Telegraph
leader writer. ‘Even while still young his prowess with the fair sex was legendary and the stories about him legion. He attacked everything with vigour.’
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It seems clear that from 1897 onwards Augustus was a changed man. He
was changed not only in appearance, but also in his work and behaviour. In his first year at the Slade, Tonks had described his work as ‘methodical’. Now his drawings, remarkable for their firm, fluent, lyrical line, and executed with assurance and spontaneity, seemed to promise a new force in British art. What excited his contemporaries was ‘his skill in making very beautiful line drawings of nudes and of portrait heads’, writes the critic A. D. Fraser Jenkins. His large life studies revealed great delicacy and he continued ‘compulsively to draw from the female nude. In drawing with line rather than shadow, John turned his attention to the rhythm of the outline, and his fascination with this later became dominant.’
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Spencer Gore, who went up to the Slade in 1896, remembered him making ‘hundreds of the most elaborate and careful drawings… sketch-books full of the drawings of people’s arms and feet, of guitars and pieces of furniture, copies of old masters’. Whenever he moved his rooms, people would go and pick up the ‘torn-up scraps on the floor which was always littered with them & piece them together. I know people who got many wonderful drawings that way.’
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